Literary Birthday – 17 November – Christopher Paolini

It was really a personal challenge to see if I could write a book. I wasn’t looking for publication. I thought maybe my parents would read it, maybe my sister….

The real torture with Eragon came in the editing. I discovered that editing is really another word for someone ruthlessly tearing apart your work with a big smile, all the while telling you that it will make the book so much better. And it did, though it felt like splinters of hot bamboo being driven into my tender eyeballs.

I think the closest thing we have to magic is the power of stories. It’s the power to transport us to worlds we could never visit, worlds that don’t exist.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character. Even as he has gone through his coming-of-age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming-of-age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon’s, but fortunately, I don’t have people charging at me with swords.

I view writing as a job and so I sit down every day and work a certain amount every day whether or not I feel like it. If you want to be a professional writer then you need to write consistently.

A book is not a sprint…for the most part, books are marathons, especially books of the length that I write. So you have to prepare yourself mentally and physically to get through however many months of work it’s going to take and that requires being disciplined.

I love telling stories and I love writing so the fact that I can do it professionally is something that I’ve always been very grateful for.

Christopher Paolini is an American author. He is best known for writing the Inheritance Cycle: Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, Inheritance. His first novel, Eragon was published by Paolini’s parents. Carl Hiaasen brought the book to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Knopf made an offer to publish Eragon and the rest of the Inheritance Cycle. At 19, Paolini became a New York Times best-selling author. Eragon has been adapted into a film of the same name.